Jean-Baptiste Bernadet: So Far, So Close, 2017

Jean-Baptiste Bernadet's references range across a broad spectrum of art historical precedents, from Monet, Vuillard and Munch in the past to Joe Bradley and Josh Smith in the present. Like his forebears in colour painting, Bernadet uses the ways that colours, and their interaction, both activate the senses and allow the viewer to reflect back on the nature of that sensory activation, something which we realize in conditioned by both us and the artist being products of a certain time and place.

'Colour is a difficult entity to identify, let alone control. While we can agree, for example, on something being blue-the sky, say-and on something else being green-the grass, say-even scientists cannot definitively conclude that this collective agreement signals that we all in fact perceive the exact same shade. This is borne out in the ways that colour is described, which is often via metaphors ans allusions. Those of us with regularly functioning sight know what grass looks like, regardless of scientific specificities, so to refer to green as the colour of grass is something that inherently makes sense, event if it is not empirically testable. For these same reasons it is hard to explain colour to a blind person who does not have these visual analogues at hand since, for the most part, it is a quality given almost entirely to sight, even if it is then also often intensely felt through the body's other faculties.'

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